Cal Poly Science Cafe at the San Luis Obispo Mini Maker Faire

Event Details

The San Luis Obispo Mini Maker Faire will celebrate doing and making again for its second annual event at Mission Plaza! This year, Cal Poly Science Cafe will feature Pete Hawkes, an interaction designer and artist based in Los Angeles. Pete will be on stage at intervals throughout the day leading us in a Binary Dance.

We’ll do some fun dance moves to toggle a symbolic bit value in a simple binary sequence: 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16. The dance is awkward, but a blast, and will show how computers store complex data with simple 1’s and 0’s.

Here’s an example of his recent work, which Pete introduces this way:I had the opportunity recently to do some work on a new interactive album from a Philip Glass / Beck collaboration called _REWORK. Good friend David Wicks was hired by Snibbe Studio (of Bjork iOS app fame) to create the app.

I created a series of visualizations in Processing that were used as jumping-off points for several of the tracks on the album. I lucked out and got to spend most of my time on Beck’s 21-minute track NYC—easily my favorite track on the album. The tests above use keystrokes to choreograph connections between independent particle subsystems. Final iterations in the app were rebuilt by David in Cinder to leverage events and information from MIDI, SVG, and XML.

More about Pete, from petehawkes.com:
Pete Hawkes holds an MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA and a BFA in Graphic Design from Brigham Young University. He has designed interactive experiences for Nokia, Ogilvy Interactive, KFC, Liz Claiborne, Boeing, and the Sci-Fi Channel. Pete’s work has been presented at the AGIdeas Design Conference in Melbourne, Verge: the OgilvyOne Global Digital Summit, and FILE in Sao Paulo. He currently teaches part-time at UCLA Extension and works at Oblong Industries in Los Angeles.